So the Wolfram|Alpha engine launched last weekend to a great deal of fanfare, but the reactions from blogs and the twitterverse show that a lot of people just don’t get it.

This is not surprising, we’ve been conditioned by Google et al to type in a phrase and expect ten blue links, so when you first accessed the Wolfram|Alpha input box, what did you type? Your name? A natural language question?

I bet the answer to your first query was the disappointing:

Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

That’s because Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine - it’s a knowledge inference engine and so many people struggle to get the best out of it. It deals with facts, maths and statistics and it deals with them very well.

In this post, I’ll show you ten useful queries that should build the right kind of mindset and encourage you to experiment with the tool a bit further.

1. Stock Comparisons

How about a nice chart of Microsoft versus Google?

2. Complex Mathematics

Stephen Wolfram wrote the excellent Mathematica program so you can bet that Wolfram|Alpha will kick ass at maths.

It can solve quadratic equations and differentiate them, and even plot fractals.

3. Date Manipulation

What is the date of the first Tuesday in May, next year?

Most of us would flick through a calendar to answer a question like this, but Wolfram|Alpha can save us time:

It’s the 4th!

4. Analyse Sports Statistics

Despite knowing nothing about baseball, I can check the histories of the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. That’s probably useful to someone less geeky than me.

5. Find Out Flight Times

Enter two city names to see the distance between them and the average flight time. Here is London to New York.

6. Show Movie Casts

Not as detailed as IMDB but pretty handy all the same.

7. View Currency Fluctuations

Here is a query of definite use to me right now - the dollar vs the UK pound.

8. Show Website Traffic Estimates

Using Alexa traffic data, Wolfram estimates that apple.com receives 11,111 visits per minute.

9. Compare Chemical Compounds

Very useful for chemistry homework, here’s Methanol compared with Ethanol.

10. Calculate Your Mortgage Payments In Plain English

Who hasn’t wanted to cut through the financial gibberish and get to the bottom line quickly and easily.

Whilst researching this post, I hit a few limitations of the Wolfram|Alpha engine (and user interface) - in particular a bias towards placenames, not great when there are places like Dollar in Scotland and Pound in Wisconsin - but a bit of experimentation usually brings you to the correct syntax.

In all, I think Wolfram Alpha has been a successful launch and I look forward to seeing just what future improvements are in store. In the medium term, I hope that the API is extended to allow third party developers to use the inference engine to process their own data - that would be very cool.

Have you found any interesting queries that showcase Wolfram|Alpha’s engine? Leave a comment.